Venkat Raghavan

Venkat is an Operating Partner at BGV. He is a senior product and operations executive with a strong track of building and scaling businesses in cybersecurity and enterprise software at IBM, Blue Coat Systems, DASCOM and Freddie Mac with rich and diverse experience spanning 25 years across large technology, pure plays and start-ups and highly regulated industries, Venkat has held a variety of senior operational roles in product management, engineering, portfolio management, hardware supply chain management, strategic, business development and corporate development.

Venkat started his cybersecurity journey at Freddie Mac where he architected, developed and pioneered Web and Internet based Loan Origination Systems. Later as DASCOM (startup pioneer in Web security), he helped built a Web security platform for Authentication, SSO and Authorization for Web applications and properties, which established Web Access Management as its own category in the cyber security market and was acquired by IBM as the security foundation for e-business. As one of the original leaders of IBM Security, Venkat played a huge role in constructing a world class security portfolio that grew product revenue from $18M to $1.1Billion (2000 -2012 and established IBM as a trusted enterprise security brand in the Global 2000. IBM Security portfolio enjoyed sustained Gartner MQ leadership in Web Access Management, Identity & Access Management, Federated Identity, Application Security, Privileged Identity Management, Data Security, Network Security (Deep Packet Inspection, Intrusion Detection), Host and Virtualization Security. Venkat assembled a world class security product and engineering organization through organic efforts and integrating 6 security acquisitions. Venkat reintegrated Internet Security Systems (pioneer in IDS/IPS that IBM acquired in 2006) into IBM’s software portfolio (from global services) and championed IBM’s market entry into SIEM with the acquisition of Q1 Labs in 2011. At IBM Security, Venkat held a variety of roles, leading the Security Segment strategy, Product Management, Advanced Threat Research, Software Engineering and Hardware Supply chains.

At Blue Coat Systems (2012-2015), Venkat reengineered the turnaround and repositioning of Blue Coat from a Secure Web Gateway product to as a next generation enterprise security and advanced threat defense leader. Under Private Equity operating model, Venkat developed the security transformation agenda with the CEO, stabilized and accelerated new product development, revitalized organic innovation and repositioned Secure Web Gateway as the orchestration layer for policy-based control of egress and ingress traffic. To accelerate inorganic efforts, Venkat drove the corporate development strategy and strategic acquisitions that resulted in Netronome assets (SSL Orchestration), Solera Networks (Incident Response) and laid the foundation for Cloud Access Security Broker acquisition that completed Blue Coat’s credible transformation as an enterprise security leader.

More recently as Vice President for Strategic Business Development at IBM Research Venkat successfully developed, incubated and curated early stage research technologies which led to the launch of IBM Blockchain business. As Vice President in IBM Research AI, Venkat has been responsible for orchestrating and developing IBM’s end to end Research to Product Roadmap with a specific focus on developing core AI Platform capabilities (Watson AI), APIs, Enterprise AI Applications (Watson AI) and AI infusion into IBM Cloud Native platform offerings and IBM Services.

Venkat is multi-faceted leader and brings deep contemporaneous technology and business acumen targeting 3 deep secular trends in software: Cloud Native, Privacy/Security and AI. Venkat believes that these secular trends will accelerate the Cloud Native Software era and is very passionate about scaling market opportunities at the convergence of these trends.